Identifiers are required for the performance of many data processing tasks, especially transactional data processing tasks. For example, an identifier is often assigned to a customer, a purchase order, an invoice, a transaction and/or another logical or physical entity for the purpose of administration and/or data processing. Such identifiers have some level of uniqueness that corresponds to the purpose of the identifier. Further, some identifiers are globally unique whereas other identifiers are unique only within a certain defined field of application.
Identifiers are also used in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, such as the SAP R/3 system, SAP ERP or SAP CRM, commercially available from SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany). For example, in the R/3 system every document that is administered and processed by the system can be assigned a document number that is unique for a company within a fiscal year. Various number ranges are used to define how the document number is generated and assigned.
Such document numbers serve as identifiers and can be assigned externally or internally. For external assignment, an accounting clerk enters the number of the original document during a document entry, or the number is transferred automatically from a pre-invoicing system.
A prerequisite for the external assignment is that the document numbers are unique. For internal assignment, the system automatically assigns a sequence number and the accounting clerk manually records this number on the original document. This method is used if the original documents do not have an unique document number, for example, with vendor invoices.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems and methods that facilitate the assignment of identifiers, especially in a distributed data processing system, while reducing or avoiding the need for manual system interaction. Such solutions should facilitate the automatic provision of identifiers in a distributed data processing system. For example, a number of transactional computer systems may be coupled to the Web service. When a transaction number is required, a corresponding request may be generated and sent from one of the transactional computer systems to the Web service. In response to the identifier request, the Web service may return a unique transaction number. Depending on the implementation, the transaction number may be unique with respect to the requesting transactional computer system, within a certain task area or kind of transaction, or it may also be globally unique.